Last month I voted on a very long ballot that appeared to be mostly judges. Knowing Texas recently added the 512th District Court, I realize there are at least 512 robe-wearers, plus county judges, justices of the peace, and a few dozen appellate and supreme court seats. I’m glad I live in a state that takes justice seriously.
At some point I stopped trying to remember which court handled which kind of dispute and just trusted the Founding Fathers planned for citizens to occasionally say, “Well, that name sounds reasonable.”
Judges do decide important things—constitutional rights to traffic citations—and apparently whether working on a farm qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.
That one was in the back of my mind. Possibly because I’m married to a judge who believes hard work is character-building, personal responsibility still exists, and nonsense has a short shelf life in his courtroom. When I mentioned the federal ruling that found prison farming unconstitutional, he gave me the same look he gives defendants who explain that the meth in their pocket belonged to “a friend.”
He said Texas prisons once relied heavily on farming and ranching. Inmates grew crops, tended cattle, and produced a lot of their own food. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was productive, and the meals were fresh and healthy.
After the Ruiz ruling in the 1980s curtailed many of those operations, the system drifted away from agricultural programs. Today the prison system spends millions each month purchasing food and running facilities that once helped sustain themselves. According to hubby, the irony lies in the low quality food the inmates now eat.
Which might explain why the debate crossed my mind last summer while I was celebrating the fact that I had successfully grown enough cucumbers to make actual pickles.
Real pickles. In jars. The kind you show off like you personally reinvented agriculture.
To be fair, some prison farms in the past looked less like vocational training and more like a sequel to “Cool Hand Luke”—massive fields, brutal heat, and guards who clearly did not attend the Healthy Workplace Culture seminar. So, perhaps, the concern makes sense.
Still, there’s something deeply satisfying about coaxing food out of the dirt. Humans have enjoyed doing it for roughly 10,000 years, which suggests farming is not universally regarded as a human rights violation.
It’s also the idea behind planned food forests like MatriArk Village—spaces where families learn to grow fruit, vegetables, and herbs right in their own community. Kids see how food grows instead of thinking it comes from the refrigerated aisle at H-E-B, while the soil does what soil was designed to do and humans mostly coax things along with sunlight, water, and a few dollars’ worth of seeds.
Turns out my dirt is surprisingly cooperative with some good gloves, a little patience, and ChatGPT to analyze my many photos of brown leaves.
Growing food is empowering when we teach it to children, admirable when farmers do it for a living, and deeply satisfying when suburban hobby gardeners like me produce an edible pickle.
But when inmates do it, we have a constitutional conversation—which suggests the problem may not be the vegetables.
The cucumber, for its part, remains baffled.